Google Mobile Usability Errors

If you have ever received an email from Google stating that your site has "mobile usability errors" – don't panic. In this article, we'll go over what is causing these errors and what to do about them.

Why Google sends these emails

Google bots are constantly crawling websites to ensure Google search results are displaying accurate/up to date information. Crawling also helps Google determine if a site meets Google's standards, such as the presence of an SSL certificate, correctly structured content, mobile friendliness, and many other factors. This all helps Google to determine where your site will rank in Google search.

If your site (or a certain page on your site) is crawled and the bot discovers an issue, Google will send you an automated email requesting you to fix those errors.

The most common "errors" you might see mentioned in a Google mobile usability email are:

  • Text too small to read
  • Clickable elements too close together
  • Content wider than screen

These errors are arbitrary and are almost always flagged incorrectly.

What's the deal? Why are these flagged incorrectly?

When a page is crawled by Google, the bot does not crawl every single file on your site. Typically, Google is able to detect the most important files needed to view your site, crawl those, and exclude the extraneous files. However, this detection process is not perfect and sometimes, a very important file is not crawled: your theme's style.css file.

Your theme's style.css file is what adds all of the structure and appearance to your theme (think layout, spacing, fonts, colors, etc). Without this file, your site is a blank shell. If this file is not crawled, the Google bot will be under the impression that your site has no structure/layout, improper font sizes, no mobile coding, and so on. But the file IS in fact there, it just was not crawled by the bot on this particular crawl.

This is all an automatic Google process unrelated to your theme. And most importantly, this does not reflect how your site actually behaves on mobile or in the Google Mobile Friendly test we'll go over below.

Additionally, these are not Google ranking factors at this time. As long as your site is mobile friendly and you don't see any issues with your site on mobile, you can safely ignore "mobile usability" emails. Your site will only be dinged in search if the Google Mobile Friendly test did not find your site to be mobile friendly.

What should I do about these errors?

Nothing. You can simply ignore them. Most of the time, the errors will disappear the next time your site is crawled by Google.

Learn More

This is a well-known Google issue. If you'd like to learn more, visit here, here, and here.

Still not convinced?

If you'd like some peace of mind, head over to the Google Mobile Friendly test tool and enter your website URL. It will take a minute or two for your site to be scanned. Once completed, you will be shown an image of how Google sees your website, along with a "red" or "green" result indicating if your site is mobile friendly (or not). If there are any errors found, they will appear under Details.

If your site is determined to be mobile friendly, you can rest assured that your site is behaving correctly on mobile, Google is seeing your site as it should, and there are no issues to resolve.

Note: On very rare occasion, the Google Mobile Friendly test will also fail to load your theme's style.css file, for the same reason we explained earlier in this article. If that occurs, open the Google Mobile Friendly test in a private browser window and run the test again. Your site will likely render correctly.

If you have a persistent "red" (not mobile friendly) result in the Google Mobile Friendly test, which does not go away after a couple tries, please submit a support ticket so we can take a look at what may be causing that.